Splinters of Scarlet

by Emily Bain Murphy

  “I’m not sure . . .” Helene looks at me. “This would be an extraordinarily intricate job. I think it’s ruined.”

  “Then you won’t mind if I try,” I say, boldly holding out my hand.

  Helene exchanges a look with Ness, who gives a slight nod.

  “All right,” Helene says, relenting. “Thank you. Do your best and let me know what the cost will be.” She strips off the coat, revealing a cream patterned jaconet dress with a crisp necktie and tiers that pour out from her small waist like water spilling from a fountain. “We’re staying at the Vindmølle Kro tonight,” she says, offering the coat to me. Her eyes linger on mine for half a beat, almost as if issuing me a challenge. “And we leave in the morning.”

  “I’ll bring it there,” I say with confidence, and take the coat from her.

  What I’ve done today might cost me my job, my board at Thorsen’s, and any goodwill I ever had with Ness—but at least I’ve bought myself a chance to see Eve one more time. I look her in the eyes and say, “I’ll come to the Kro.” Then I hug the coat, careful to keep my heart clenched tighter than a fist within my chest, and run.

  * * *

  Thorsen beat me back to the shop.

  As soon as I round the corner, I can see his meat-red face through the window, shouting at Agnes and pointing to my empty work desk. Cursing, I duck into an alley and clutch the coat to my chest. I could lie—say I was called out to pick up this job for Mrs. Vestergaard. But I suddenly feel too worn and raw to face either of them. I turn on my heel to steal up the back alley and sit on the cleanest stoop I can find, feeling the cold of the stone seep into my skin. At best, Thorsen will dock my pay for weeks—which is unfortunate, since I already spent it all on Eve’s fabric. At worst, I’m fired, without so much as a single rigsdaler saved to my name. And after the stunt I pulled at Ness’s, I’m probably not welcome there tonight.

  But one thing at a time. I am alone in a narrow alley, and I consider the row of windows above me: the shutters all closed, the shades mostly drawn. The windmill blades turn lazily above my head. I’ve never allowed myself this much magic. Not so many times so close together. And never, ever in public.

  I take a deep breath and smooth out Helene Vestergaard’s coat, examining its mess of rips and spidering threads. I run my fingertips over each fissure, and imagine what the stitching used to look like with its golden tendrils and vines. Magic stirs within me and my veins feel a sparking rush; even beneath my dread of the Firn I shiver with the pleasant chill of magic. I let it flow through me, delicately running my fingertips along the coat’s frayed edges. The threads find one another and knit themselves back together under my touch.

  I think of what my father would say. He forbade me to use magic when he was alive. He feared it, and he was right to.

  I’m glad he didn’t live long enough to see what it did to Ingrid.

  A few centuries ago, under a different king, we would have been burned at the stake for having even a whiff of magic. Now it’s more or less understood that the greatest danger we pose is to ourselves. People avert their eyes and mostly pretend we don’t exist, because the goods that underground magic can produce are useful—despite the unpleasant side effect that the magic might eventually kill us. But even at the age of six, I understood nothing good could come from someone who wanted an orphan with magic. The penny paper stories would make my toes curl up inside my boots: of people being kidnapped and forced to use their magic until the crystalline frost of the Firn filled their bloodstreams and killed them. Sometimes I joined in telling late-night ghost stories at the Mill so no one else would suspect; but it hurt to sit there, listening to the other children’s voices in the dark. They whispered that we had deep blue bones and insatiable appetites, and that when we died we were jealous of the living. They called us draugar—“again-walkers”—because the Firn sometimes leaves people’s bodies contorted in unnatural positions, sitting upright after their veins crystallize with ice, as though they’re someday planning to return. The adults would shush the children, insisting that those were little more than silly legends and stories. Yet old fears and customs die hard. We may not be burned at the stake anymore—but they make sure we are always cremated.

  I suddenly see Ingrid standing in front of me, the ghost of a memory from years past.

  “I think,” she whispers, blinking down at her wrists in a daze, “I think I went too far.”

  I grit my teeth, feeling the tense fear of the Firn build in a gathering storm along my jaw. I shouldn’t think of that memory now.

  Instead I examine Mrs. Vestergaard’s coat and even let myself smile a little at my work. The rift has vanished, as though it was never there at all—as if the threads knew exactly where they were always supposed to belong. I don’t have any money to spend warming myself with a coffee in a café, and I certainly can’t return to my room at Thorsen’s, so I wrap Helene Vestergaard’s own coat around my shoulders and sink into its softness. There’s the faintest hint of her perfume, lingering. It smells like spring and paper white blossoms.

  Perhaps I can find my own way to Copenhagen.

  I can still see little Eve blinking her large, dark eyes up at me, holding out Wubbins. How sternly she instructed me to mend only his tear, not the rest of him, because she liked him perfect and ugly just as he was. That was the day she started to thread her way into my closed heart, despite the fact I never wanted her to. Because I always feared this day would come. And I don’t want to know what will happen tomorrow when all those reluctant stitches of hers are suddenly ripped out.

  The sky inks with night as I make my way past Mathies’s Bakery, with its torn gold-and-red-striped awning that sags a little bit more with each snowfall. At Christmastime, Mathies always gave each of us orphans a honey heart biscuit, hardened and brushed with melted chocolate, and I ate mine all at once, but Eve would wrap and hide hers under her bed and take one tiny bite each day to make it last until New Year’s. I pause in front of his window, catching the scent of bread wafting from the inside, wondering what the world would be like if I could walk along and fix it all with the touch of my finger. Every tatter, every hole worn into the knee of a pant, every sad, old awning. How much good I could do, if it didn’t threaten to cost me so much.

  I wonder if there is someone out there like me, who can mend the rips and tears in people.

  Hidden by dusk, emboldened by the magic that I can still feel humming in my veins, I hesitate. Then I dart my hand out and pass my fingers ever so briefly over Mathies’s awning.

  Maybe tomorrow, if my plan fails and Eve has left forever, I will come back and watch for the moment he discovers the awning is fixed.

  It is still mending itself as I hug Helene’s coat tighter to me and hurry away.

  * * *

  The Vindmølle Kro sits on the outskirts of town, a white-and-olive-colored inn with a thatched roof. The chimney from the second cottage sends out puffs of smoke that are as thick and white as whipped cream. The air smells like cinnamon pears and burning leaves.

  I rap sharply on the door.

  “Who is it?” a voice calls from inside.

  I clear my throat. “It’s Marit Olsen. With your coat?”

  I thrust it at Helene Vestergaard the minute she opens the door. Behind her, Eve is already wearing a new crimson dress with satin rose ribbons and black boots that are as shiny as oil. A new trunk is open at her feet, and inside I see the glint of the gold beads of her tutu.

  I turn away from an embarrassing prick of jealousy—wondering what it must feel like, after all those years of yearning, to finally be picked.

  Helene takes the coat from me and examines it. Her expression is unreadable.

  “You work at a tailor shop?” she finally asks. I nod and she gestures me inside a room with exposed ceiling beams and thick quilts folded at the ends of the two straw beds.

  “Marit did well, didn’t she?” Eve asks. The fire crackles in the hearth, and the hammer and pick pendant gleams from her
neck. She looks to Helene and me: her gaze bouncing between her past and her future. I desperately try to memorize her dark freckles, the mole just below her ear, the way her hair tufts up like soft down around her temples.

  “Yes, Eve,” Helene says. She runs her fingers over the whorls. “This stitching is magnificent.” For the first time, I force myself to really look at her as she uncinches a small purse embroidered with flowers. Her eyes are a rich brown—honey dark and intelligent, surrounded by thick lashes and a high arch of cheekbone—and her wrists are small and delicate as a robin’s egg. My fingernails seem so blunt and jagged, bitten to the quick.

  “How much would you like for the work?” Helene asks.

  “Actually,” I say, “I’d like to request something different as payment.”

  Helene cocks a sharp eyebrow and watches me with interest.

  Eve stills behind us, listening.

  “I’d like you to recommend me to a tailor in Copenhagen,” I say. “Based on the quality of the work I’ve done on your coat.”

  I look at her, biting my lower lip. Asking for a favor, from one Mill orphan to another.

  Surely a word of recommendation from Helene will go a long way in Copenhagen. Surely she has a tailor who will be eager to please her. And I would still have a chance of seeing Eve sometimes, when they came to the shop. It’s my last, best hope.

  “You made Eve’s tutu, as well?” Helene asks, studying me. “Have you done much costume work?”

  “Some,” I lie.

  Helene shuffles through a healthy stack of rigsdalers. “It’s an interesting proposition,” she muses. “But I’d like to raise you a counteroffer. I’ve been looking for someone with truly exceptional skill to make my clothing, and now Eve’s.” The fire gives a loud crack from the hearth.

  “Perhaps you would like to come work for me,” she says.

  The air in the room instantly stills.

  “I recognize that the work you’ve done here is . . . exceptionally good,” she says. “For its quickness, its high quality,” she continues, looking down at the coat. “I’ll pay you very well, and give you room and board. But I would insist on your work continuing to this very high standard.”

  Her eyes flick to me meaningfully, and a chill goes through me.

  She knows.

  She knows about the magic.

  “Of course she will!” Eve cries, leaping to her feet. She takes a step toward me. “Marit, you can come with us!”

  My heart quickens. I could go with them.

  I could be with Eve.

  It’s everything I ever wanted.

  But it’s entering into an arrangement with the very family who took my father from me—and doing the one thing he begged me not to.

  “You will have to decide quickly,” Helene says. “We leave at dawn.”

  All I can do is nod, and Helene offers me the handful of rigsdaler bills—more than I make in a month at Thorsen’s. “This is for your work today.”

  Eve rushes to embrace me. “Mrs. Vestergaard took me to a shop and let me choose anything I wanted,” she whispers, and thrusts something into my hand. It’s a silver thimble with tiny braided knots running along the rim. “I picked this for you, so you wouldn’t forget me. But now, Marit—” She cuts herself off in excitement. “We can be together!”

  My fingers close around the embossed knots, frozen and hardened in silver. The first gift from her new family, and she gave it to me. I brush my lips over Eve’s forehead and feel the fluttering of fear, like wings dipped in iron.

  Then I tuck the thimble in my pocket and sprint all the way back to Thorsen’s.

  I throw open the door and run past him, up the stairs, with him and Agnes hot on my heels.

  “Where have you been?” Thorsen thunders behind me.

  “I’m leaving,” I tell them, hurriedly stashing my clothes and toiletry bottles into my beat-up carryall as Thorsen yells, his face purpling all the more, and Agnes watches with smug lips, leaning against the wall with her arms folded over her chest. I open the trap plank in the floor and grab the only sentimental things I have left from my old life: a book of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales that my father used to read me, and the last letter he ever wrote. Then I fly down the stairs, fishing out half the bank notes Helene gave me and tossing them on my work desk. It’s enough to cover the beads and fabric I took, and a little more for leaving Thorsen in such a lurch.

  “Goodbye!” I shout, pulling Thorsen’s door shut behind me for the last time, feeling reckless sparks of thrill and dread. I run toward the Kro. Toward warmth. Toward Eve. It’s true that using magic for the Vestergaards could come at a heavy price. This job could actually cost me my life.

  But if I stay . . . what life is left for me here?

  I pound on the door.

  “I’ll take it,” I say breathlessly when Helene opens the door a crack. I look past her and say directly to Eve, “I’m coming with you.”

  Helene moves aside to let me in, and Eve leaps forward to throw her small, familiar arms around me. “We set off at dawn,” Helene says, locking the door with a final click behind me.

  And just like that, the two sides of our coin come together.

  Almost as if they were always meant to.

  Chapter Five

  Philip Vestergaard

  1849

  Faxe, Denmark

  There is blood on my sleeve.

  A stain, as though someone dipped the end of a paintbrush in rust and swept along where my shirt meets my wrist. I take in a lungful of sooty air and try to rub out the spot, but my fingers are dirty and the stain has set. I was nervous enough about begging for a job today—and that was before I knew I was wearing my own mother’s blood.

  I stand under a wooden sign that swings and creaks over my head. As a wagon with a rickety wheel rumbles by, I reach up and rap on the door, then carefully tuck my stained sleeve behind my back.

  This is what I always told myself I would do, when my father and brother marched off to war last year singing “The Brave Foot Soldier.” If the worst happened—if men bearing news of war came to our door wearing black—I would don my best shirt and go to the cloth factory set on the corner at the outskirts of town. The law may say that I have to go to school, but what good is learning if the rest of me is starving? I picture my mother, the shake of her thin shoulders as she dried the same dinner plate for close to an hour this morning, and shore myself up, warning my voice to not dare sound tinny.

  When the door swings open, the man standing on the threshold wears spectacles and a sooty apron and looks down at me, with an expression both expectant and aggravated. “Yes?” he says.

  I shift in my shoes, which are a half size too small. “I was hoping to speak about a job,” I say, and my voice sounds only a little thin. I swallow. I can tell it is warm in there, the heat flowing out into the cutting chill. I’ve heard stories of people dying or maiming themselves terribly. But suddenly I want nothing more than to be inside—out of the bitter cold, and near machinery just loud enough to drown out my own thoughts.

  “Come in,” he says.

  He leads me down a narrow hallway to a door marked MANAGEMENT and knocks. I remove my hat, and my nose suddenly starts to drip. The machines whir nearer and louder.

  “This boy wants to speak with you,” the soot-stained worker announces, and deposits me in front of a man smoking a cigar and examining paperwork on a desk cluttered with cloth samples. The office is dark and dim, with only a small window, and a Danish flag is spread across the wall behind his head.

  “I was wondering,” I say, clearing my throat, “if I could work for you on the cutting machines.”

  “No,” the manager says, without even looking up. “I don’t need any more your age. What are you, fourteen?”

  I’m twelve.

  “Please,” I say, my voice faltering. I stare hard at the spot on the top of his head where his hair is thinning, like floss.

  He finally looks up. “Aren’t you
a Vestergaard boy?” he asks, squinting. He wets his ink pen. “Your father can’t give you work in his mines?”

  I bite my lip. Our mines have been shuttered since the start of the war. Because no one needs limestone for building or chalk for paint right now. They need metal for rifles and cannons.

  “Far died yesterday,” I choke out. “In the war.” I’ve said the words out loud, and now it’s real.

  “I’m sorry,” the manager says gruffly. He nods at the Danish flag, then at me. “Take pride in knowing that he served Denmark well.” He gestures toward the door. “Vestergaard, eh? I’ll let you know if a spot opens.”

  I hesitate for a moment, kneading my hat in my hands. When the man delivered the sealed letter this morning, my mother became so inconsolable that she got a nosebleed. For one long, awful moment I didn’t know who had been killed—my father or my older brother. I didn’t know whose name I least wanted to read in that letter. I handed her a handkerchief, and when she took it from me, her blood got on my sleeve. I can see it now, out of the corner of my eye, when I stand and walk back out into the gray rain.

  Don’t cry, I tell myself fiercely. Men don’t cry. I am a man now. But if the war drags on, if Aleks dies too, we might well starve. I lean against the cold stone of the factory wall and take a shuddering breath.

  “Oy! Philip!” My friend Tønnes ducks out of the bakery across the road and jogs toward me, holding a hat down on his blond curls. When he reaches me, he puts a steadying hand on my shoulder. “I heard about your far.” He thrusts a little piece of bun into my hand. “I’m sorry,” he says. His father’s fighting too.

  They all made it sound so important, so noble. Far was so proud to fight, so that Denmark wouldn’t continue to be “dismembered,” as he called it. “Denmark has been shrinking for a thousand years,” he announced in his booming voice. Remembering him now makes tears begin to fall onto the ground next to my feet. “The southern duchies of Schleswig and Holstein cannot be lost to Prussia.” He pulled me into his lap, tracing down the veins in my wrist. “Those trading routes are like veins, connecting trade to Russia, and they are vital.” So the mines, once filled with men unearthing limestone, suddenly emptied and went dark. There used to be life inside of them, and inside of me, but now it’s gone, and all that’s left is an abandoned, gaping hole.